“Americans are devoted to the pursuit of happiness. Unfortunately, research shows that many of us don’t actually know what makes us happy, so we end up pursuing the wrong things,” writes Dr. Shlomo Benartzi, professor and co-head of the behavioral decision-making group at UCLA Anderson School of Management.
One way to help your happiness is to do a test. It’s called A/B testing.
I’m familiar with A/B testing with our websites. Change a couple of words in the title of a piece and it’s shocking what a difference it can make in reader interest.
As Dr. Benartzi points out:
In research I’ve conducted with Hal Hershfield at UCLA and Steve Shu at City University of London, we used A/B tests to experiment with different versions of the same basic financial offer. Users of a saving app were randomly assigned to one of two groups. The first group was asked if they would like to save $5 a day, while the second group was asked if they would like to save $150 a month. (The amounts are essentially equivalent.) Although we had predicted that the $5 a day question would perform slightly better—it made saving seem less painful and intimidating—I was shocked by how much better it did: Those users given the $5 question were four times as likely to sign up.
Your takeaway? Try and A/B test certain areas of your life, such as where you will retire. Try living in your chosen retirement destination by renting for a season. Pretend that’s where you live, and then draw up your plans from there. Doing this can help you avoid costly mistakes and guarantee the decision you make is the right one for you and your family.
